There was a flicker of something in Greta’s look. I couldn’t tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness.

I told my mother he looked like a deflated balloon. Greta said he looked like a small gray moth wrapped in a spider’s web. That’s because everything about Greta is more beautiful, even the way...

I suppose I’m in that very small group of people who are not waiting for their own story to unfold. If my life was a film, I’d have walked out by now.

The day my mother gave us the keys, she also made me and Greta sign a form so that the bank knew our signatures. To get in we had to show our key and sign...

That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die...

You know, Junie, you’re fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. …The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have...

…there’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special, even though you know you’re not.

They segued into a more general piece about AIDS. As usual, they started out with footage of some kind of sweaty nightclub in the city with a bunch of gay men dancing around in stupid...

That’s the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours–

Maybe you had to be dying to finally get to do what you wanted.I fidgeted around with the puzzle pieces for a while longer, but I wasn’t lucky. Nothing seemed to fit without a whole...

Things you’d never even seen with Finn could remind you of him, because he was the one person you’d want to show. “Look at that,” you’d want to say, because you knew he would find...

I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and...

I really wondered why people were always doing what they didn’t like doing. It seemed like life was a sort of narrowing tunnel. Right when you were born, the tunnel was huge. You could be...

Please promise to take the very best care of my only girl. With so much love my heart might split in two…

I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.

I dream about people who don’t need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.

You could try to believe what you wanted, but it never worked. Your brain and your heart decided what you were going to believe and that was that. Whether you liked it or not.

But they gave me Finn. He said it like maybe it was worth the trade. Like it was something he would do again if he had the choice. Like he would take a man’s legs...

It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do. They think they haven’t had enough time. They feel they’ve been shortchanged.

My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.

Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same...

When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that’s what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No...

But you don’t know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.

I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.

If you close your eyes when you sing in Latin, and if you stand right at the back so you can keep one hand against the cold stone wall of the church, you can pretend...

None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with...

Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.

People didn’t know everything then. There were things people had never seen before. Places nobody had ever been. You could make up a story and people would believe it…also maybe it seems like it would...

It’s hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.

…I felt the wall between the world of secrets and the real world start to collapse. I felt the girls from the portrait becoming us and us becoming them…